JMB launches exhibition series on highlights from the collection
Press Release, Tue 21 Jan 2025
In future, the Jewish Museum Berlin (JMB) will be presenting exhibitions on selected items from its own collection under the label “JMB Collection”—with free admission. The museum wants to give more space to its own collection: the series exhibits objects that have never been shown before or that open up new perspectives on the diverse Jewish culture in Germany. The JMB presents the exhibitions in the Eric F. Ross Gallery on the ground floor of the Libeskind Building. This year, they are dedicated to Leonard Freed, Salman Schocken—in collaboration with the American author Joshua Cohen—and Claude Lanzmann, who would have turned 100 this year and whose film Shoah made history 40 years ago.
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Dr. Margret Karsch
Press Officer
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presse@jmberlin.de - Address
Jewish Museum Berlin Foundation
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German Jews Today: Leonard Freed
The photo exhibition German Jews Today: Leonard Freed marks the start of the series. In the early 1960s, the Magnum photographer Leonard Freed (1929–2006) traveled through West Germany taking photos of German Jews, mainly in the areas around Frankfurt and Düsseldorf. It was less than twenty years since the liberation of Auschwitz, and the Federal Republic of Germany’s confrontation with the crimes of Nazism had only just begun. Jews living in West Germany mostly described a sense of their lives as fragile; there were only a few, small Jewish communities. Freed wanted his photographs to counter non-Jewish Germans’ ignorance of the invisible Jewish minority in their country. The JMB holds all the fifty-two photos in the series that Freed published in 1965 under the title Deutsche Juden heute (German Jews Today), now presented in its entirety for the first time. The debate on whether it is possible to live in Germany as a Jewish person continues even today.
The exhibition opened on 11 November 2024. Further information about the photographer, his work and the period from which the photographs were taken has since been added to the website on an ongoing basis. With the exhibition, the JMB is taking part on the European Month of Photography, which runs from 1 to 31 March.
Accompanying Program to the Exhibition German Jews Today: Leonard Freed
Curator’s tour on Thu, 23 Jan & 13 Feb & 13 & 27 Mar & 10 Apr 2025, 4 pm (in German): Curators Leonore Maier and Theresia Ziehe take turns guiding visitors through the exhibition German Jews Today: Leonard Freed. Find out more about the background to its creation, individual motifs and references to the present day.
Panel discussion on 18 March 2025 “German Jews Today”—A discussion from the 1960s (in German): at the beginning of the 1960s, Jewish life in the Federal Republic of Germany was anything but a matter of course. In his book Deutsche Juden heute (German Jews Today), published in 1965, the American photographer Leonard Freed captured insights into the everyday life of Jews in West Germany, from Düsseldorf to Frankfurt am Main and Munich.
The website with current information on the exhibition can be found at www.jmberlin.de/en/freed.
Inventories: The Legacy of Salman Schocken
The JMB invites US author Joshua Cohen to explore the cultural legacy of the publisher and department-store entrepreneur Salman Schocken. Through selected objects from the JMB collections, Joshua Cohen’s exhibition comments on the history of the publishing house Schocken Verlag, which he takes as a vantage point for a present-day perspective on culture and capital, department stores and museums—and, not least, new questions about (re)acquisition.
Joshua Cohen will be present at the exhibition opening on 19 May 2025. Martina Lüdicke and Monika Sommerer are curating the exhibition and the accompanying program.
The website with current information on the exhibition can be found at https://www.jmberlin.de/en/exhibition-inventories.
Claude Lanzmann: The Recordings
The third exhibition in the series will be on display from 27 November 2025: To mark the centenary of the birth of Claude Lanzmann (1925–2018), journalist and documentary filmmaker, this large-scale exhibition presents the audio archive of his film Shoah (1985) for the first time. The audio archive—along with the film, which made history when it appeared forty years ago—was designated part of the world’s cultural heritage by UNESCO in 2023. The collection includes 152 previously unknown magnetic tape cassettes. They document the numerous conversations with victims, perpetrators, and others that Claude Lanzmann and his assistants carried out in the 1970s and early 1980s, during their many years of research before filming began. These audio recordings form the focus of the exhibition, supplemented by objects, documents, and film footage.
The website with current information on the entire project, which is headed by curator Dr. Tamar Lewinsky and research assistant Dr. Sonja Knopp, can be found at www.jmberlin.de/en/project-claude-lanzmanns-audio-archive.
